Hiker’s pace reveals desert’s subtle diversity

Your feet will work fine, but you need to train your brain to hike the desert of Central Washington.

For those used to roaming the forests and mountains of the Cascade Range, this country is too big, too wide open, a bit unnerving. Lots of it looks the same — endless plains of sage and bunchgrass. Even at a fast walk it feels like you’ll get nowhere soon.

The keys: Look down, not up. Reduce speed. Listen to the sounds of the desert, not your footfalls. Breathe deeply and smell the sage.

“It’s not 60 mph country,” says Chuck Warner, manager of The Nature Conservancy’s Beezley Hills and Moses Coulee preserves. “This kind of area is subtle. People who go too fast can’t appreciate the resources that are here.”

These include the fierce little hedgehog cactus and its bold deep-pink blossoms, a profusion of spring wildflowers, such as yellow balsamroot and white phlox, orange lichens lighting up brown coulee walls, and meadowlarks that sing flutelike melodies while hiding in the sage.

“The desert is very different,” says Alan Bauer, co-author and photographer of “Desert Hikes: Washington.” “Seeing and listening are important. I’m just nuts about documenting the tracks, the scat, the bones, the nests and things like the dark trunks of the big old-growth sage.”

It also is important to wrap your mind around what this country is, what has shaped it and what’s happening to it.

Much of the natural landscape east of the Cascades is properly called shrub-steppe, characterized by dry, rolling sage and bunch grass plains and providing greater biological diversity, it is said, than old-growth forest.

In Central Washington, much of this country is edged and rimmed by basalt laid down millions of years ago by lava flows that hardened into dramatic columnar and pillowlike formations. Some 12,000 to 20,000 years ago, this region was burnished into its current form by cataclysmic Glacial Lake Missoula floods.

“Probably initially, there was more sagebrush in Washington than evergreen trees,” says Warner.

While hundreds of thousands of acres of Washington’s shrub-steppe remain intact and protected, over time dams and reservoirs, irrigation and agriculture, homes and cities have altered more than two-thirds of it. While mule deer, badgers, coyotes, rattlesnakes and a diversity of birds continue to thrive in the shrub-steppe, the loss has been severe enough to all but eliminate a few “shrub-steppe obligate” species, including the pygmy rabbit and sharp-tailed grouse.

To address such issues, over the past several years a critical core of shrub-steppe in Central Washington, bounded by the Waterville Plateau on the north, the Beezley Hills on the south and east, and the Badger Mountain-Palisades country on the west, has come under the protection of a cooperative program by state and federal agencies and nonprofit groups. At more than 300,000 acres, the Moses Coulee/Beezley Hills Conservation Area also offers plenty of open space for people to hike, roam, look and listen to the shrub-steppe.

“People need to know that someone cares about this land,” says Warner. “These aren’t wastelands. Every place is a special place, but this is a really special place.”

Not everyone is getting the message. Like anywhere, there are those who continue to abuse the land by dumping garbage and leaving litter and graffiti.

“Our biggest problem in the Beezley Hills is garbage dumping,” Warner says. “We’ve hauled out, I can’t even begin to count how many refrigerators, washing machines and truckloads of garbage and trash. It’s a bit of a lawless area, but it gets better every year.”

It boggles the brain to see the damage done to certain spots, such as the lower canyon of Douglas Creek on Bureau of Land Management property. It’s a stunning place where the year-round stream tumbles and slides into rocky grottos of basalt, known for decades as a party spot. “We’ve had a consistent problem with trash down there,” says Jim Fisher, field manager for the BLM’s Wenatchee region. But it’s not all trashed. Most of the conservation area is in fine shape and provides great hiking, and most consider spring the best time, especially April with the peak of the wildflower bloom.

It can be snow-covered in winter and blistering hot in summer, when rattlesnakes are most active. Speaking of the serpents, they have been out this spring during warm weather. They prefer rocky and brushy habitat and almost always will give you a warning when you get too close. It is wise to check your clothing and your body for ticks after hiking in the desert.

And about desert hiking: much of it is not on trails per se. A lot of it is wide-open country you can wander, but note the few landmarks in these endless seas of sage, or know how to follow a compass heading.

Lots of hiking, too, is on closed jeep roads. Some of these hikes also are adjacent to, or cross, private property.